Praxis in Practice

A Furries Fantastic Devblog!

Mental Health: Not a lot to report on here, the meds work now and I feel a lot better! Still anxious sometime, but I am able to sleep tightly, and I am able to not die daily. That's good.

Work: Work has kind of blown up. We're moving forward with immense speed and a little under-organized for the time being. Trying my best to keep up!

Organizing: I'm trying a new app to organize my days, gotta report on it another time!

Compassion: There was something that occured to me recently about how the left tends to treat itself from time to time. It's what happens when someone who rejected liberalism comes back around to liberal methods while being on the left. I've seen a few friends fall to that and only use Twitter for that sweet sweet dopamine hit that being "right" gives them. It's exhausting to see, really, and I hope I can find a way to prevent that in future communities.

Mental Health: Increased the dose of drugs last weekend, now I am still dealing with some bad effects. I've started feeling better all in all though, but the heart palpiltations and the short breath is really getting me and making me more anxious.

Work: Work was slow this week, thank god, but I've started actually getting back to it, and that's great.

Life: I'm trying my hardest to make me do more things, but it's an uphill battle and OMG I'm scared

IWW: I joined the IWW, still waiting for more info from them. But I am a comrade now.

Gender?: I've started questioning my gender and start to identify more non-binary. I'll see where that goes~

Editors Note: This week should be the last one that isn't covering any progress that isn't mental health and personal.

Mental Health: Turns out my mental health issues are mostly related to generalized anxiety. My therapist suspected a deeper seated anxiety in me. And I'm starting Zoloft now. That's around all I have for you this week, there just has been a lot of introspective and reflection.

/* I thought that maybe if everything stays the same, nothing has to change. But everything is changing. */

Mental Health: I don't know when, but at some point between my amazing vacation and me quitting my job I lost myself. I lost Praxis. I felt like I was in a great place, and I felt that I was getting better by the day, but in reality? I withdrew more and more. I lost more and more of myself, bit by bit. This cummulated in the end of my two year relationship. The relationship was honestly unhealthily dependent, I needed him to feel good about myself, to believe in myself, but now I notice: There is nothing right now I could even believe in. There is no me in here. And that changes, now.

Me: I've taken great and scary steps towards... being more. I talked openly to friends, and I plan to open up to more friends. And I am terrified. And I am petrified. And I am... doing things. Looking back, this is what Praxis was about. This is what this whole damn blog was about. I've tried and I've started to do things just for the sake of doing them. And with some luck, I can keep it up. And with some luck, I will feel better soon.

Commitment: Fun time is over. I need to use this blog more reliably. I need to not just update it because I don't feel like it. I need to do it because it's what I do. This blog is supposed to be part of me. I need to make it part of me.

Relationship: I'm not even sad that it ended. Don't get me wrong, I definetly was. I broke down, even. But I understand at this point, that the way we were together was hurting us, and I was too scared to face that reality. Too scared to address the elephant in the room. I remember telling him that I was scared therapy would mean I would learn to no longer depend on him. It sounded sweet in my head, even. I remember him telling me that we wouldn't break up because he also depended on me. We were codependent. My only regret is being in denial for so long, part of me always kind of knew. I never even told my therapist about him, neither did I ever even mention him proper in this blog.

Therapy: She's been on vacation for a while now. Our next session is next Thursday, and I am looking forward to it, looking forward to finally address what I think is actually wrong with me. And then we'll see what's next.

CODE: I'm now in full preparation mode of the exam period, which will be 3 exams for me, personally. One about Graphics Interfaces, one about Clean Code (which I have a hold of theoretically, but I gotta show something, so I am reworking an old bot of mine with sensible design this time). And one simple being "Algorithms and Data Structure", in which I just need to be able to implement well known sort and search algorithms. It's not necessarily hard, but it still takes time to prepare.

Job: My job is developing fine so far, the stack I am working on is horrible though, and we plan to change that. It's a bit exhausting working with a horrible code base...

Health: I actually adjusted my diet since the last log, I am living off healthier food now, let's see if there is some sort of long-term effect :3

Super Animal Royale: The game I have discovered only yesterday, found here, is fun and easy to pick up. It's a neat little game and I love it.

Politics: So I am informing myself a little bit about german parties at the time, and also starting to become more engaged at CODE. I got the support of my mentor for awareness campaigns I'm planning.

Game Making: Didn't really have the time to do anything here, but I'll forcefully keep this on my logs to remind me to do more!

Well, I failed at making this a weekly thing, it seems. Well, let's just keep going.

State of this Blog: Okay there is no way around this. This is my first entry for two months!!! This is mostly because I was going through a lot by quitting my job and looking for a new one. It was a very taxing time, and I am glad it's over.

Mental Health: But speaking of which, let me lose a few words about how I've felt the last two months. The month of March was terrible for me. Feburary less so, that was only stressful. However, my therapist and I decided to cut the therapy to be biweekly instead of each week. And I am figuring a lot of things out about myself.

CODE: My studies have gone to hell and back, honestly. The group that came together and that I worked with slowly but certainly lost motivation and fell apart. This is the third CODE project in a row that was met with a fate that led to not having any proper result at the end of the project phase. It's disheartening, however, I will cope.

New Job: Okay, time to talk about my new job. First of all, I am no longer employed as a Working Student, but rather as a proper Software Engineer. This is great. I'm actually employed by my university (CODE) and work on the intranet now. That's currently Elixir, so not much changes there. It's been great so far!

Wandersong: Late last month I also played the wonderful game Wandersong. And it's just fantastic and I love it. It's been growing on me even more since I got through it.

Health: Now for some bad news. I've been working towards solving a few of my health issues, one of them being bad sleep quality. Turns out I 99% suffer from Sleep Apnea. I'm saying 99% because I've always suspected it, I was also told so by Jasper during my time in the US, and have done more research into it recently, and it just adds up. I got an appointment in the middle of May to look into it further, but until then I'll have to deal with it. That's alright, I've dealt with this for most of my life.

Politics: I've considered starting a political Youtube channel. But that's a lot of work. But I also think I'd enjoy it somewhat. I'll continue to think about that.

Game Making: I started formulating a few proper ideas for a side project on my own. The hardest part is trying to keep the scope small. I'll tell you more once I got more concrete things to tell you.

I'll try to make this a weekly thing again, but that'll take some discipline, let's see if I got that in me ;)

Travel: So, I'm home. I'm a bit exhausted. I still feel the jetlag. It wasn't as bad as in San Francisco, but it was still really really bad. The discomfort is getting less by the day, I'm a fighter :3

Mental Health: My base level happiness has greatly increased. My therapy said she noticed that during the session, too. Like, I am a mess right now, but I am a happier mess.

Apartment: I've finally started decorating my apartment. I've been living there for 1.5 years, but this is the first time I've started living there. Put up a fursuit calendar, put up a few posters, hung a scarf, got a cat lamp. Thank you, Jasper :3

CODE: My Co-worker and buddy has taken great care to accommodate me while I was gone. Taking care as to organize a group of students for a game making project, and I am very grateful about his efforts!

Github Commits: I once set out to have a commit a day, that halted for my vacation. I've got around 3 blank weeks now. I am trying not to feel bad about that, and I'll try to pick up the slack. Go me!

It doesn't have to be hard, you just have to make an effort sometimes.

Furry: So, Further Confusion happened. It was great. I met a bunch of cool folk, but I was still mostly reclusive and silent. That's okay, though.

Mental Health: The reason I felt reclusive was mostly because of a huge ditch to self-worth. The people I met were more professional and adulter than I am. I am a web dev, aspiring game dev maybe. I do not feel comfortable talking about that because of Imposter Syndrome. I know that now. It's good knowledge. Thank you.

USA: So, my time here is almost over, and I was mostly lazy. SO WORTH IT THOUGH. I really needed this break. I am low-key looking forward to actually doing something again though.

Google: I'm sorry, I have really fallen out of love with Google. I really loved them at some point, now a mixture of me getting woke + their shitty practices of recent months makes me hate them.

I'll be home on Tuesday. Kinda sad, kinda good. Doesn't really matter if it's sad or good :)

Hey, this is going to be a prose entry again, since it's not like I've done a lot of focused work last week. I've been essentially sick, I underestimated jetlag and suffered the consequences. Jasper took good care of me, though. My travels have been great so far, seen a lot, will probably talk more about it next week???
Anyhow, currently I'm in the Hotel room at FC. I think I'll leave it at that and go and enjoy the con :3